"Now what enemies do we have?"

In the third chapter of Becoming Taiwanese, Evan N. Dawley goes into some depth discussing a Lunar New Year banner hung in the Jilong Customs Assimilation Association (基隆同風會) meeting hall in 1935. The purpose of the Customs Assimilation Association (CAA) was to promote the assimilation of Japan's Taiwanese subjects to Japanese culture, though there was less a sense, at least at the time the CAA was established, of a need to eradicate all non-Japanese practices than there was a kind of negotiation between local practices and the norms of the Japanese metropole. For instance, Dawley notes that a "mild critique" of local religious festivals is "couched in a Confucian morality that must have been familiar to Jilong's islanders" (151). 

The banner at the CAA building is another such negotiation, according to the author. After translating the couplets on the banner, one of which reads, "With the same sentiments and origins, we enforce military preparations and encourage culture and learning, why should we fear that our enemies will run wild?" (154), Dawley argues that the couplets represent a negotiation between "their Chinese heritage and their accommodations to Japanese rule" (155). Going into more depth about the reference to "enemies," he writes, 

The reference to "enemies" (hu'er [胡兒]), a term with an ancient application to supposedly uncivilized groups beyond the state's borders, was [155||156] perhaps the most telling statement of their independent consciousness. On one level was the question of just who these enemies were. Just across the Taiwan Strait lay Republican China, where the central government did not have firm control over all of the provinces, but the centralizing regime at times threatened Japanese interests; to the north of the area under Nationalist Chinese rule lay Manchuria, an ancient homeland for China's enemies, including some historical hu'er, where the Japanese Army ran a puppet state through the last Manchu emperor and challenged Chinese sovereignty. Which group corresponded to the enemies who might run wild? At no time had [local Jiling elites] Yan and Xu overtly displayed the sort of anti-Japanese Chinese nationalism that flourished across the strait and motivated the "half-mountain people" (banshanren) who left Taiwan to fight Japan in China. They would certainly not have risked referring to Manchukuo as an enemy in the presence of Government-General representatives. It is more likely that both the ongoing fragmentation in China and the potential danger of a more unified nation under Nationalist control sparked the metaphor, but even so the message did not favor expansion, since these enemies gave no real cause for concern. Yan and Xu subtly challenged those who saw Taiwan as a bastion for further imperial conquest, and they did so by relying on an old Chinese worldview of external threats, and on the language of literary Chinese, which connected them to their cultural background rather than to contemporary Japanese nationalism. (155-6)

I like Dawley's interpretation of the rhetoric of "enemies" in the couplet. I hadn't heard of the term hu'er before; when I looked it up, another thought occurred to me. I saw that one of the definitions of the term notes, "清 末 民 初泛用為對外國人的蔑稱" (meaning that hu'er was used at the end of the Qing and the beginning of the Republican period to refer more generally to foreigners). I wonder if Japanese were ever called hu'er...

This couplet reminded me, too, of another place where I saw "enemies" referred to: in a sixth-grade Guoyu textbook lesson from 1956. In this lesson about a Chinese war hero named Yan Haiwen, "the enemy" is never referred to by name, just by the appellation, "the enemy" (in this case, using the term diren [敵人]). At the end of the lesson, students are asked, "Who was China's enemy at that time? Now what enemies do we have?" In the textbook, the writers are vague about the identity of the enemy in order to force students to emphasize that the Japanese were the enemy of China at that time, and then through the second question, to identify with China by answering the question about the enemies "we" have now. For Taiwanese sixth-graders in 1956, whose older relatives (including siblings or parents) might have served the Japanese military in some way, to be associated with "China's enemy" in their Guoyu class must have been traumatic.